Isaac and Ishmael: How Muslims Think about Israel, in a Nutshell

Isaac and Ishmael: How Muslims Think about Israel, in a Nutshell

OnIslam, which is a breakaway website from Islam Online, has a fatwa section where someone recently asked this:

Can you answer the question why the Palestinians and the Israelis have been fighting for so long? What is it all about? Why do they seem to hate each other so much? Is it related to the Catholic/Protestant faith, Judaism and Islam?

The answer given is very illuminating.

It illustrates why real peace is impossible: because the other side doesn’t even know the basic facts about Judaism, Zionism and Israel. It is simply not possible to reach an agreement when one side’s entire conception of the others is, simply, filled with lies.

Here is the first part of the answer:

In the Bible, in the Book of Genesis there is a verse which reads:

“And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.” (Gen. 17:8)

You can read this verse in the Jewish Book called Torah also. Here Jehovah is addressing Abraham, the Patriarch. Because Jehovah (God) was pleased with Abraham, He wishes to give the children (“seed”) of Abraham the Land of Canaan as an everlasting possession.

It is the present Palestine that is meant by the Land of Canaan. The Jews interpret the expression “thy seed” to mean the people who later came to be known as the Children of Israel.

Israel was the second son of Isaac; and Isaac was the second son of Abraham. Jews argue that they are the people to whom God or Jehovah gave Palestine as an everlasting possession, that is because they claim to be the Children of Abraham through Isaac.

But here they ignore Ishmael, the first son of Abraham, and his children. (The Arabs are the Children of Ishmael). They deny the right of Ishmael saying that he was the son of a slave woman Hajar, whereas Isaac was the son of a free woman, Sarah.

In fact, in the Torah itself it is clearly stated that the firstborn should get double portion of his father’s share, even when his mother has a lower status. Read the verse in the Book of Deuteronomy of the Old Testament of the Bible and the Torah:

“If a man has two wives, one beloved, and another hated, and they have born him children, both the beloved and the hated; and if the firstborn son be hers that was hated: then it shall be, when he maketh his sons to inherit that which he hath, that he may not make the son of the beloved firstborn before the son of the hated, which is indeed the firstborn: but he shall acknowledge the son of the hated for the firstborn, by giving him a double portion of all that he hath: for he is the beginning of his strength; the right of the firstborn is his.” (Deut. 21: 15 to 17)

You find here two rules:

1. Of the wealth of the father, the eldest son should get double portion;

2. If the eldest son happens to be the son of a hated woman (hated for some reason such as her lower status), his double share should not be refused to him, on that account.

This simple rule of the Torah is ignored by the Jews here, when they argue that Ishmael should not get his right.

What I mean here is that even if we appeal to the Torah, the Jewish religious book, the Jews have no exclusive right to the Land of Palestine. The fun of the matter is that the Christians of the world, with the exception of the Palestinian Christians, have accepted the claims of the Jews, even when their own Bible is against it.

And all the modern secular states of the so-called civilized world accept the claims made by Israel on the basis of a book at least 2,000 years old, in order to deny the birthright of a people who have no other land but Palestine.

Don’t you love when Muslims tell Jews how to interpret the Torah?

The “scholar” answering the question obviously ignores what God said a mere ten verses later:

And Abraham said unto God: ‘Oh that Ishmael might live before Thee!’ And God said: ‘Nay, but Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son; and thou shalt call his name Isaac; and I will establish My covenant with him for an everlasting covenant for his seed after him. And as for Ishmael, I have heard thee; behold, I have blessed him, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation. But My covenant will I establish with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear unto thee at this set time in the next year.’

This is all besides the many sections where God promises the Land to Isaac, Jacob, and the Children of Israel. By cherry-picking one verse, and mis-characterizing an irrelevant biblical section later, the writer is simply lying about what the Torah says. (And even according to him, Jews should have one-third of the land from the Nile to the Euphrates–so Israel better start picking up more land!)

Then he goes on to say:

We must also understand that the present day Israelis are mostly European Jews who have migrated to Palestine. They have settled there ousting the original people, massacring them, or making them refugees in their own land.

Probably about half of Israelis are descended from ancestors who lives in Arab lands. No one counts, because it really doesn’t matter, except to racists.

You know that the Jews were a tribe of hunted people in the whole of the Christian world; because they were considered to be the murderers of Jesus. In all European cities, they were confined to the dirty areas in the suburbs, called the ghetto.

The Jews were treated like animals and they were not allowed any rights by the Christian countries. In fact the Jews were given the freedom to live as citizens only in the Arab Islamic world. It is here that you can see the most horrible instance of ingratitude, in the way the present day Jews reward the Muslims for the consideration they used to get.

The persecution of Jews in Christendom reached a terrible level during the Second World War in Germany. Hitler and his Nazi Party killed thousands of Jews in Concentration Camps.

Thousands? Well, let him explain:

This incident in the history of the world is usually called the Holocaust. (The Jews of today have made the Holocaust look far more terrible than it really was; just to get the sympathy of the world so that they will be excused for the Palestinian Holocaust. But there is nobody to call the plight of the Palestinians a Holocaust, even though the conditions are comparable).

Ah, I see. A few thousand Jews were killed by the Nazis–fewer than the number of Palestinian Arabs killed by Jews!

At the end of the Second World War, Britain promised the Jews a state in Palestine, because they wanted to rid Europe of the curse of the Jews for one thing and they wanted to keep a promise they had given to the Jews while fighting the Nazis.

Balfour just disappeared into thin air!

The whole project of Israel was the scheme of a group of (chiefly European) Jews called Zionists.

In the World War II, Germans were fighting against the Allies (i.e. Great Britain, the US, France, etc.). Since the Jews were the most persecuted people in Germany, they (i.e. the European Jews) helped the Allies in the war.

By this time Jews had started their Zionist movement. Zionists demanded a reward from the Allies for their role in the fight against Hitler; and the Allies offered the Arab land of Palestine to the Jews for their state. Towards the end of the WW II, Jews from Europe startedcoming openly and secretly to Palestine which was under the British rule.

There are more lies here than I can count. European Jews were a little too busy trying to avoid being slaughtered to be able to help much in the Allied war effort, but guess who did?

Zionist Jews from Palestine! You know, the ones who weren’t there before WWII ended.

In 1947, there were about 1.3 million Arabs in all of Palestine. By 1949, about 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were living in squalid refugee camps, set up virtually overnight in territories adjacent to Israel’s borders.

About 300,000 lived in the Gaza Strip… Another 450,000 became unwelcome residents of the West Bank of the Jordan. There were many Arabs living in Israel as citizens. But the new state was bent on facilitating the growth of the Jewish nation at the expense of Arab rights.

OK, let’s think about this. According to this article, there were 750,000 Palestinian Arabs who ended up in….the West Bank and Gaza, which is in– Palestine!

So why didn’t they make their state then? Why were they considered unwelcome in Jordan when Jordan is the only state that gave them citizenship?

You can read the whole thing to see how false this “history” is. But as bizarre as it is, it points to the fundamental problem: you cannot negotiate with people who are so far removed from the truth, and who are so willing to lie, brazenly and without fear.